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EBICS is widely regarded as secure transfer protocol for the exchange of payment files (orders and statements). For corporate customers in particular, it is certainly the most commonly used protocol. At this point I would like to present a different use case that is very relevant in Switzerland: EBICS in the private banking sector.

European payment transactions are converging thanks to SEPA and EBICS. With the help of EBICS 3.0, various EBICS dialects are now merging. The concept behind this process is called BTF. BTF stands for Business Transaction Format. BTF standardises the description of the formats to be transferred in Germany, France and Switzerland. This harmonisation clears the way for a growing EBICS community.

Future service participants can use SIANet or EBICS to connect to the new pan-European real-time payment infrastructure from November 2017 on – other options may follow later.

EBA CLEARING announced today that the future participants in its pan-European instant payment infrastructure service will be able to use, in addition to SIANet, the Electronic Banking Internet Communication Standard (EBICS) for the exchange of transaction messages with the platform. The Company will introduce EBICS as an additional connectivity option from the start of the service in November 2017 and make it available in the test environment from June 2017. Continue reading →

The data behaviour for payments also continues to change with SEPA. New processes mean that the files exchanged between customers and banks and in bilateral exchanges keep getting bigger. In the customer-bank relationship in particular, the download function for data downloads (e.g. account statements) via EBICS plays an important role. And here at least there seems to be a need for optimisation. For particularly large files, various factors make it difficult to perform a successful download.

Since 2013, the major Swiss banks have offered their corporate customers the EBICS communication standard. Since May 2015, Switzerland has been an official member of the EBICS committee that aims to promote and maintain the standard throughout all of Europe and beyond. To help EBICS make a definitive breakthrough, the leading EBICS producers and the major Swiss bank Credit Suisse have formed a work committee to promote EBICS in Switzerland (AFES). Swiss software producers benefit from a campaign that enables a smooth start with EBICS.

This year Sibos took place in the tranquillity of Geneva. The airport was right next door, with the speeding planes leaving the runway in full view. Instant payments took off in similar fashion. It was one of the predominant topics at Sibos. The preparations for its introduction are going full blast.

The European Parliament’s Payment Services Directive PSD is the legal basis for the EU-wide uniform internal market for payments. The current version, PSD2, was published on 23/12/2015 in the Official Journal of the European Union and must be implemented in national legislation by 13/01/2018. How does the PSD2 affect EBICS?

The above headline is taken from a statement by the Reporting and Analysis Centre for Information Assurance (MELANI) from July of this year. The statement describes a new type of hack on companies in Switzerland.

To process mass payments, especially in the case of multibank accounts, companies today generally use offline software for the transmission, approval and execution of electronic payment orders. Transfers are triggered automatically directly from within the ERP software and are transmitted to the bank via secure protocols. This type of payment processing accounts for the majority of the electronic payment orders executed in Switzerland today.

The EBICS protocol is designed to transfer large data volumes, call up account information and authorise orders. These are the basic requirements of a treasurer and they are fulfilled by EBICS, guaranteeing the success of EBICS.

In the age of digitalisation, more and more information is provided at increasing speeds. Even EBICS must fulfil this requirement, and its response consists of mobile EBICS apps that inform the customer fast.Continue reading →